The Hell of It All (29 page)

If this strikes you as a trivial subject to write about, you’re wrong. Really. Bollocks to the rest of you. I could’ve sat through live 3D news footage of some gruesome bloody war, watching starving women and children being machine gunned in the face by Terminator rebels, and I’d have just shrugged. So what. Stop crying. They’re only bullets. Try having my throat. Try some genuine suffering, you pussies.

Here’s a real-life nightmare for you. Late last Wednesday night, passengers on a Canadian Greyhound bus had their enjoyment of the on-board movie,
Zorro
, soured when one of their fellow travellers suddenly launched into an appallingly violent and apparently unprovoked attack on the stranger sitting beside him. Following a frenzied assault, the attacker decapitated his victim with a hunting knife, then held up the head for the horrified passengers (who by now were standing outside the bus, holding the doors shut) to look at.

Every aspect of this story is terrifying. I don’t know what frightens me most. There’s the fear of suddenly falling victim to a violent killer, obviously. Then there’s the behaviour of the killer himself: according to witnesses, he’d been sitting on the bus behaving entirely normally for at least an hour before the attack. What if he’d been behaving entirely normally his entire life, then suddenly went crazy without any warning whatsoever? What if that could happen to anyone? One minute you’re sitting at home watching
Cash in
the Attic
, the next you’re nodding in slavish agreement as a six-foot crocodile with fruit-machine reels for eyes commands you to torch the house next door. How long does it take to go irretrievably mad anyway? Is there a speed cracking-up record? It’s not a comforting thought.

Then there’s fear number three: the thought of witnessing a lifechanging atrocity first-hand. Being hopelessly morbid, I contemplate this sort of thing all the time. For instance, when sitting in a cinema, I often get slightly distracted by the thought that a bomb might be about to go off. Once a thought like that has entered my head, I can’t shift it; I imagine the flash and the blast and the screaming. Bits of kidney landing in my popcorn, that kind of thing. You try concentrating on
Mamma Mia!
with a brain full of ominous foreboding. It’s impossible.

Someone cleverer than me once described this condition as having an ‘Alfred Hitchcock mind’, in reference to the way many of Hitchcock’s movies contain a sequence in which a scene of everyday
mundanity is given a macabre spin by the viewer’s certain knowledge that something terrible is about to happen (
The Birds
, in particular, is full of moments like this). I prefer to think of it as being perpetually stuck in the opening moments of an episode of
Casualty
, where every stepladder, plug socket, and loose-lidded food processor is a grinning, lurking deathtrap.

Perhaps you normalities pity us sufferers. Wrong. You’re hardly awake. We live on the edge. Wouldn’t you prefer each of your daily activities to come imbued with this kind of nervous frisson? I can scarcely cross the street without imagining, in punishing detail, how it would feel to be run over by an oil tanker – to feel my own sense of awareness becoming distorted in new and grotesque ways as my brain is squished between the treads of its tyres. Would I hear my own skull pop open beneath the wheel? Or would I be unconscious by then? That’s the level of grisly contemplation I like to wallow in. Consequently, each time I successfully make it to the opposite pavement, I feel genuinely glad to be alive. Who needs extreme sports? Why jump from a plane for kicks? Jesus, don’t you have an imagination? Sod that trip to the airfield. Stay in the kitchen, where you could potentially slip on a floor tile and skewer your eye on a potato peeler. That’s all the excitement you need.

A weird side-effect of this frankly dubious mindset is that, while I love gruesome fictional horror (which tickles those same morbid synapses for entertainment), I can’t bear to witness real-life nastiness. Recently someone tried to show me a YouTube clip of some unfortunate yobbo having his leg crushed beneath a collapsing brick wall. But I couldn’t even listen to the damn thing, let alone look at it. Genuine violence and gore tends to leave me feeling dizzy, cold, and somewhat changed. Not everyone is the same. Apparently, said YouTube video is accompanied by all manner of ‘LOL his knee iz shattered!!!’ user comments, left by warm-hearted viewers who found the spectacle as gently amusing as a
Vicar of
Dibley
Christmas special.

Perhaps I should toughen up. I recently spent some time on the set of a forthcoming apocalyptic TV show involving lots of fake blood and gore. For several days on the trot, there were smashed
cars, flames, smoke, corpses and exposed innards everywhere I looked. At first it’s genuinely depressing. Then you grow warmly accustomed to it. Before long I was kicking dead women and children around for a laugh. It’s probably desensitised me just enough to cope well in the immediate aftermath of a small nuclear explosion. While everyone else is screaming just because a few charred limbs are dangling from lamp posts, I’ll be calmly scouring the rubble for weapons. All the better to fight gangs of marauding bikers with.

In fact, I’m wondering if it’s worth setting up some kind of holiday theme park specifically aimed at desensitising visitors to reallife atrocities they may encounter in the future. Basically, it would be exactly the same as Center Parcs, but with burnt trees and ultrarealistic latex corpses strewn around the place, some of them featuring state-of-the-art in-built animatronics, so they can slowly claw their way across the ground toward your kids, screaming and twitching with their eyes popping out. Hey, it’s character-building. A holiday with real purpose. Beat that.

Here’s a news story guaranteed to provoke a fusillade of indignant spluttering, courtesy of your inner Clarkson: German politicians are reportedly planning to ban Kinder Surprise eggs on the grounds that they’re a safety hazard.

In case you’re not familiar with the concept, the ‘surprise’ inside each Kinder egg is a cheapo little toy housed within a plastic shell. Anyway, the Germans are worried that hungry, gurgling kiddywinks might mistake the gifts for food and wind up choking to death. ‘Children can’t differentiate between toys and nutritional items,’ said Miriam Gruss, a member of the German parliamentary children’s committee.

What, really? Don’t get me wrong – I think children are idiots. But even I find that statement a tad unfair and sweeping. I used to have a spud gun when I was a kid. In case you’re not familiar with that concept either, it was a small metal pistol that fired chunks of potato.
Not once did I aim the potato at anyone. Or try to deep-fry the gun. And I was thick as shit. I guess it was luck.

In fact my run of luck was pretty impressive. Other toys I failed to ingest include a Scalextric, several boxes of space Lego, the board games Operation and Mousetrap, and a complete collection of Paul Daniels’ TV Magic Tricks – even though the latter included an egg-shaped gizmo called The Magic Egg. Somehow, miraculously, my conker-sized kiddywink brain managed to differentiate it from a real egg. Thus my life was saved by a whisker.

Gruss won’t countenance such a slapdash approach to child safety. Not on her watch. ‘It’s a sad fact,’ she said. ‘Kinder Surprise eggs have to go.’

As you can imagine, the committee’s proclamation has already caused a fair bit of outraged huffing, not least from the manufacturer, Ferrero, which until now has perhaps been best known for providing the catering at badly dubbed ambassadors’ receptions in the late 1980s.

‘There is absolutely no evidence that the Kinder Surprise eggs, as a combination of toy and foodstuff, are dangerous,’ said Ferrero’s spokeswoman. Then she snatched a golden-foil-wrapped nobbly chocolate bollock from a nearby silver platter and added, ‘Monsieur, with these Rocher, you are really spoiling us.’

Now I’m no fan of Ferrero chocolate, which vaguely tastes like regurgitated icing sugar to me, but I can’t help thinking that it would be hugely unfair on the company if an unsubstantiated link between Kinder eggs and danger began to form in parents’ minds and sales suffered accordingly. Let’s face it, even though Kinder eggs are generally bought for the gift rather than the sickly chocolate shell, and even though many of the toys are so ingeniously designed they could easily be sold on their own, munching through the outside to get at the inedible inside is half the fun.

What’s more, jittery, neurotic parents don’t need any more false scares to piss their pants over. They’re already raising their twatty little offspring like mollycoddled prisoners: banned from playing outdoors in case a paedophile ring burrows through the pavement and eats them, locked indoors with nothing but anti-bacterial
plasma screens for company, ferried to and from school in spluttering rollcaged tanks … Christ, half these kids would view choking to death as a release.

No wonder they grow up to become tiresome whooping advocates for extreme sports. If I’d spent the first 18 years of my life doing time in a joyless cotton-wool cell, listening to some angsty bloody parent banging on about how precious and special I was every pissing day, I’d snowboard off a 300-foot cliff at the first opportunity too. Under those circumstances, tumbling down a rockface and cracking your skull open must feel like a declaration of independence crossed with an orgasm.

How did we get to this point? Our sense of self grew too strong. We gazed up our own bums for so long, we each became the centre of the universe. We’re not mere specks of flesh, jostled by the forces of chance. We’re flawless deities, and goddammit we deny – deny! – the very existence of simple bad luck. If we trip on the pavement, someone else is to blame. Of course they are. And we’ll sue them to prove it if necessary.

In a bid to pre-empt our self-important litigiousness, armies of risk assessors scan the horizon, dreaming of every conceivable threat. You could bang your head on that branch. Crack a rib on that teaspoon. Choke to death on that chocolate egg.

Well, it stops here. And it stops now. Next week, I’m launching my own range of Kinder eggs. They’re called Unkinder Eggs. And they don’t contain sweets. They contain specially designed hazards. Spiked ball bearings.

Spring-loaded razor-blade traps. Flimsy balloons filled with acid. Miniature land mines powerful enough to punch holes in your cheeks and embed your teeth in the wall. The idea is to carefully nibble away all the chocolate without incurring a serious injury. Thrills! Tension! Chocolate! It’s the confectionery equivalent of extreme sports. You’ll love it.

And hey – that’s not just cocoa butter and milk solids you’re savouring. It’s better than that. It’s the great taste of risk.

Thank God for dishonesty. I can’t have been the only Briton to shift awkwardly in their seat throughout the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games the other week. The Chinese mounted an unprecedented spectacle. Thousands of synchronised drummers, acrobats, fireworks, impossible floating rings made of electric dust (surely alien technology, that), dancers, prancers, singers and flingers. Maybe not flingers. I just threw that in to complete the rhyme. But you get the picture. It was amazing. It cost around £50 million and was probably rehearsed at the shooty end of a machine gun. Dance, beloved populace! Miss three steps and we take out your kneecaps. Miss five and we go for the head. Dance till your homeland is the envy of the world! Stop weeping and dance!

Yet even as my eyes took delight in the colour and magic, my spirits sank. I’m no patriot, but I feared for our national pride come the 2012 London Olympics. How the hell are we going to top a display like that? Our plans currently consist of six roman candles, Bernie Clifton riding his ostrich, and some
Britain’s Got Talent
prick-a-ma-boob beatboxing on a trampoline. It would be less shameful if we all marched into the arena one by one, dropped our trousers, yanked our bumcheeks apart and let the entire globe gaze right up our apertures for an hour, while the Kaiser Chiefs perform their latest single in the background. If nothing else, it would give the rest of the planet something to think about. They’d never mess with us again, that’s for damn sure.

But my defeatism, for once, was misplaced. The ceremony wasn’t as spectacular as it seemed. An impressive swooping aerial shot of fireworks bursting in footprint-shaped constellations turned out to be a computer-generated lie. And the cute little girl singing the Chinese anthem was only miming to the voice of another girl, whom the authorities considered too hideous to warrant airtime.

Actually, they were right. The original girl was an absolute pig, with teeth so higgledy-piggledy you could be mistaken for thinking her skull was trying to chew its way out of her face. You could possibly use her head as the basis for the lead puppet in a children’s
programme set in Ugly Wood, provided you didn’t mind your kids vomiting in fear and disgust each time she wobbled on screen.

Oh shut up. I’m joking.

Anyway, the deception didn’t end with the opening carnival, but bled into the events themselves. Hordes of volunteers, known as ‘cheer squads’, have been been planted in the stands during underattended events, to disguise empty seats and goad the rest of the crowd into whooping on cue.

What’s remarkable about all this trickery isn’t the trickery itself – but how ineptly it’s been maintained. Even a six-year-old knows that once you tell a lie, you stick to it. You never admit the truth. Never. And when confronted with irrefutable evidence of your guilt, you dig your heels in further still – loudly denying reality until your accusers die of exasperation. It’s a brilliant strategy that’s kept the Bush administration going for years.

But the Chinese? A few timid queries and they admitted it all with a shrug. Yeah, they were computer-generated image (CGI) fireworks. Yeah, the kid was miming. Yeah, we’re using cheer squads. So what? We’re not arsed. Stop wetting your pants. What are you going to do about it anyway? Did you know that if we all stood up and sat down at the same time, the resulting tidal wave would destroy your capital cities? Ask us again if we’re arsed. Go on. Fire away.